Why Do Some Countries Have Much Higher Levels of Trust Than Others?

The lost wallet test

Imagine leaving a wallet on a train. Would a stranger hand it in? The answer depends partly on the stranger, of course, but also on your expectations about everyone else: the railway staff, the police, the person who finds it and the rules that connect them. Social trust is this willingness to take a modest risk with another person. It makes daily life less laborious. We can buy from someone we have never met, join a queue without appointing an umpire and cooperate on projects whose benefits arrive later.

Researchers often ask a blunt survey question: can most people be trusted, or must you be very careful? Responses vary markedly between countries in the World Values Survey and European Values Study.¹ Yet the question measures what respondents say about “most people”, a phrase that may evoke neighbours in one place and unknown outsiders in another. It does not prove that any nation's citizens are inherently kinder. Surveys also record attitudes at a particular time, after particular events.

Which trust are we talking about?

Trust in family is different from trust in a stranger; both differ from confidence in a court, hospital or government. A society can have strong, supportive family networks while people remain wary of unfamiliar institutions. Researchers call willingness to trust beyond one's immediate circle generalised social trust. Institutional trust concerns whether organisations are expected to act competently and fairly. The two can reinforce each other, but they do not move in lockstep.²

A useful way to think about trust is as a prediction. If a public office applies rules consistently, citizens have reason to expect similar treatment tomorrow. If a queue can be jumped by paying a bribe, that prediction becomes harder. People may then rely more heavily on personal connections to navigate ordinary tasks. Those connections are sensible adaptations to uncertainty; they can also make equal access harder to achieve.

The OECD's trust framework focuses on whether public institutions are reliable, responsive, fair, open and honest. Its multinational survey finds that people care about the integrity of officials and the quality of everyday services, not simply whether they agree with a government's policies.² An institution earns trust in small encounters as well as in major crises.

Why the gap between countries?

History matters, but it is no single-country destiny. Repeated experiences of arbitrary rule, violence or failed promises can shape expectations across generations. So can long periods of dependable service and impartial administration. The mechanism is lived experience: what happens when a person seeks help, reports wrongdoing or disagrees with someone powerful.

Corruption is particularly corrosive because it changes the apparent rules of the game. Experimental research has tested the idea that seeing officials act corruptly lowers trust in people more generally.³ This is more than annoyance with a government department. If public rules are for sale, a stranger's apparent honesty becomes less predictable, and even honest people may feel they must protect themselves.

Inequality offers another piece of the puzzle. When groups live sharply different lives, it can be harder to imagine a shared bargain in which everyone is treated fairly. A study using European Social Survey data found that higher income inequality was associated with lower political trust, including within-country changes over time.⁴ Association alone cannot establish a universal cause: low trust may also undermine policies that would reduce inequality. And the same national average can conceal stark differences between rich and poor, majority and minority, or people living in different regions.

Community life matters too. Clubs, workplaces, schools and neighbourhood spaces bring people into repeated contact with those outside their families. These encounters can make strangers less abstract, particularly when the setting has fair rules. But simply putting people together does not guarantee trust. Discrimination or humiliating treatment can teach precisely the opposite lesson.

Does trust make a country prosper?

Trust can make cooperation easier. Businesses can spend less effort checking every promise; citizens may be more willing to support collective services; public-health messages may work better when the messenger is credible. Economists and political scientists have long studied links between trust, institutions and prosperity. But rich countries can afford better institutions, which may in turn build trust. A neat arrow from “more trust” to “more growth” misses the feedback loop.

Nor is more trust always better in every situation. Scepticism can be a rational response to a dishonest institution. Uncritical confidence can allow wrongdoing to continue. Healthy trust includes the ability to question officials, inspect evidence and expect mistakes to be corrected. An open system asks citizens to take some risks together while giving them ways to hold power accountable.

Can it be rebuilt?

Trust usually erodes faster than it returns. A single scandal is memorable; hundreds of uneventful transactions can pass unnoticed. Rebuilding therefore requires visible, repeated evidence: rules applied consistently, corruption investigated, services that work and genuine routes for people to be heard. The OECD highlights reliable and responsive public services, fair treatment and stronger integrity rules as practical levers.²

There is no cultural switch labelled “trust”. People update their expectations from what they see others do and what institutions allow. The person who hands in that wallet matters. So does a railway system in which handing it in is easy, the owner can retrieve it and everyone expects the same rules to apply. Trust grows in that ordinary chain of dependable actions, one encounter at a time.